Gov2001 May 2006

gov2001@lists.gking.harvard.edu

29 participants
30 discussions

[gov2001-l] abstract

by dennis_feehan＠harvard.edu

Hi all, Here's our (untimely) abstract. Any comments would be much appreciated. Thanks, Dennis & Jeremy How Healthy Are We? A disadvantage to using ranked data for health state valuation Health state valuations (HSVs) constitute a fundamental building block for measuring health system performance. To obtain HSVs, investigators often ask respondents to value levels of disability using the time trade-off (TTO) method. This procedure is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to implement. Salomon (2003) proposes a model that estimates HSVs using only ranked data, tests it with the 1993 British General Public Survey, and finds the results nearly identical to a TTO-based model. We extend Salomon (2003) by allowing HSVs to vary according to individual characteristics like age and marital status, but find that some quantities of interest cannot be estimated with the rank data. Our results show one limitation to using ordinal data to measure cardinal quantities.

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] It's not About Race at K - revised abstract

by king＠harvard.edu

I agree with Dan. i'd save 'important' for cases when u are building some one up before u lower the boom. You're confirming their resilt so saying it is important is like being imodest about yout own work. (its always a fine line of course). Also, use 'paper' not 'article' to describe your work. An article is a published paper. And for everyone: pls don't forget to reread the 'publication, publication' paper about now. There are a lot of little things in there, all designed to make your papers better... Gary -----Original Message----- From: Dan Hopkins <dhopkins(a)fas.harvard.edu> Date: Monday, May 8, 2006 7:52 am Subject: Re: [gov2001-l] It's not About Race at K - revised abstract This is a very nice abstract. I might think about modifying your subtitle to give yourself a bit more independence from Fryer and Levitt--and to elaborate a bit on exactly how you contribute, since you have more data and new findings to offer. Also, others might disagree with this, but I think that you should avoid characterizing others' contributions as being "important" or not. Instead, I'd stick to the facts, and let the reader decide what is important. In this case, I might say "Fryer and Levitt (2004), using data from a nationally representative sample of students in kindergarten and first grade, demonstrate that the disparity in academic achievement between blacks and whites only begins after students arrive in school, after controlling for a small set of socioeconomic, family and health related characteristics." Your first two sentences have already convinced me that the topic is important... Best, Dan On Mon, 8 May 2006, Elena Llaudet wrote: > Good night everybody, > Below is our revised abstract. Comments and criticisms are welcome. Elena & Omar > It's not About Race at K: Confirming and Extending Fryer & Levitt's Understanding of the Black-White Test Score Gap by Elena Llaudet and Omar Wasow* * > Although more than half a century has passed since the landmark /Brown v. Board of Ed./ decision, black children continue to lag academically behind their white peers. For decades, research comparing the test scores of black and white students has consistently found a substantial gap, even among four-year olds. Fryer and Levitt (2004), using data from a nationally representative sample of students in kindergarten and first grade, broke important ground when demonstrating that the disparity in academic achievement between blacks and whites only begins after students arrive in school, after controlling for a small set of socioeconomic, family and health related characteristics. In this article, we demonstrate the robustness of their results, expand their analysis through fifth grade, and analyze the evolution of the gap in the first six years of school with a model more appropriate for studying cross-sectional and longitudinal data. We find that the divergence in black and white test scores continues to grow after first grade, although at a slower rate for math and at a similar rate for reading. > _______________________________________________ gov200

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] It's not About Race at K - revised abstract

by ellaudet＠fas.harvard.edu

Good night everybody, Below is our revised abstract. Comments and criticisms are welcome. Elena & Omar It's not About Race at K: Confirming and Extending Fryer & Levitt's Understanding of the Black-White Test Score Gap by Elena Llaudet and Omar Wasow* * Although more than half a century has passed since the landmark /Brown v. Board of Ed./ decision, black children continue to lag academically behind their white peers. For decades, research comparing the test scores of black and white students has consistently found a substantial gap, even among four-year olds. Fryer and Levitt (2004), using data from a nationally representative sample of students in kindergarten and first grade, broke important ground when demonstrating that the disparity in academic achievement between blacks and whites only begins after students arrive in school, after controlling for a small set of socioeconomic, family and health related characteristics. In this article, we demonstrate the robustness of their results, expand their analysis through fifth grade, and analyze the evolution of the gap in the first six years of school with a model more appropriate for studying cross-sectional and longitudinal data. We find that the divergence in black and white test scores continues to grow after first grade, although at a slower rate for math and at a similar rate for reading.

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] Abstract

by ghumphr＠fas.harvard.edu

Last minute comments? In recent years, political methodologists, have produced innumerable automated document ranking and classification systems. Many of these ignore word sequence information, treating entire documents as mere collections of words. A subset of these, including those based on the well-known Naive Bayes algorithm, assume that word frequencies are unrelated and that word sequence information is unimportant \cite{domingos96}. A recently developed algorithm known as Wordscores makes an even wider set of assumptions \cite{wordscores2003}. In this paper, we compare Wordscores to several more moderate document ranking, classification, and summarization algorithms. Surprisingly, we find that Wordscores shows remarkably improved performance at carrying out a small number of carefully selected classifications on meticuously arranged collections of political documents, demonstrate its performance at gauging the effects of news headlines on S\&P 500 daily securities prices, and discuss its utility in other applications.

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] Embarassing Typo...

by grepin＠fas.harvard.edu

Err...I mean Dan, not Dad.... Ian and Dad, In Gary's How to Write a Paper article he mentions that we should all use the American Journal of Political Science style for our bibliography. If we are writing an article that will never, ever be submitted to a political science journal, would it be okay to follow a style more consistent with our field? Karen

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] References for Term Paper

by grepin＠fas.harvard.edu

Ian and Dad, In Gary's How to Write a Paper article he mentions that we should all use the American Journal of Political Science style for our bibliography. If we are writing an article that will never, ever be submitted to a political science journal, would it be okay to follow a style more consistent with our field? Karen

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] ANNOUNCE Grades

by dhopkins＠fas.harvard.edu

Hi All, So, I'll bet that subject line caught your attention--people care about evaluations. So do we, the teaching staff. So... Please take a moment *now*, while you are already online, to fill out an evaluation of 2001. 1) Go to: http://my.harvard.edu 2) Click on the "Courses" tab 3) Click on "Evaluate" next to Gov. 2001 Sorry to spam on this... but we promise to stop when the response rate goes up! A classic collective action problem. Best, Dan ---- Ph.D. Student Department of Government Harvard University Tutor, Currier House dhopkins(a)fas.harvard.edu http://www.danhopkins.org

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] Updated Abstract for Justin Grimmer and Clayton Nall

by nall＠fas.harvard.edu

"How Poverty Racializes Competition for City Council Seats" Abstract A growing body of literature has focused on the institutional and electoral factors that lead to improved representation of minorities on city councils. These studies, however, often employ OLS regression, a methodology that can result in out-of-bounds predictions for council membership. We employ a statistical model that produces sensible results, in part by accounting for the zero-sum nature of descriptive representation on city councils. Applying this model to a recent study which argues that turnout increases representation for minority groups (Hajnal and Trounstine 2005) we find little connection between higher levels of voter turnout and greater descriptive representation of minority groups. We find, instead, that poverty provides an explanation, with higher numbers of black poor, especially, leading to higher black and white representation at the expense of Latinos. We conclude by arguing that the demographic features that activate racial politics deserve greater attention in studies of city council representation.

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] Problem with Imputation

by sheldon.bond＠gmail.com

When trying to impute a binary variable using mice, I encounter this error message in the first iteration, > imp <- mice(Womendata, imputationMethod=imp.method) iter imp variable 1 1 Approval.member Approval.Congress Trust.Index Efficacy.Index Efficacy.Index2 CompetenceError in x[good, ] * w : non-numeric argument to binary operator My data table has the following dimension 15502 by 30. Competence is a binary numeric variable with about 150 NA's. In my imp.method vector, I have specified "logreg" as the method of imputation. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what this error could mean. Regards, Sheldon

17 years, 11 months

[gov2001-l] Claire And Janet's Abstract

by king＠harvard.edu

the title and abstract are ok as a summary of what I take it is your point, but the point is not so sharp. It looks like a list more than a clear substantive point. There may not be much u can do since what u write has to represent what u find of course, but sometimes u can rethink things in a different framework... Gary -----Original Message----- From: Claire Allison Schwartz <cschwart(a)fas.harvard.edu> Date: Friday, May 5, 2006 2:55 pm Subject: [gov2001-l] Claire And Janet's Abstract Here is our abstract. Thanks in advance for any comments. Claire and Janet ------------------------------- Why Do Civil Wars Recur? Living Conditions, Attributes of the Prior War, and Autocracies Matter Of civil wars that have ended since 1945, roughly one-third have reignited. Walter (2004) argues that conditions conducive to rebel recruitment - particularly poor living conditions and lack of access to political participation - are the critical precursors to renewed civil war. Using rare-events logit, model specification tests, and a hazard model on a respecified dataset, we demonstrate that Walter's findings are robust with three key exceptions: (1) living conditions matter, but less so than the characteristics of the previous war; (2) the magnitudes of her variables' impact are smaller than she estimated; and (3) when controlling for per capita GDP, civil war recurrence is less likely in autocratic states. _______________________________________________ gov2001-l mailing list gov2001-l(a)lists.fas.harvard.edu http://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/gov2001-l

17 years, 11 months

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Gov2001 May 2006